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Month: August 2014

Both Melissa and I appreciate any opportunity to set fire to things… maybe a little too much! This recipe looked deceivingly simple, but alas, it took us a few days to get through. The idea behind the recipe is simple… burn some bread, slice some tomatoes, and make some scallion oil and mayonnaise to dress the plate with. Upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that:

You are burning brioche that you make from scratch (which takes ~24 hours)

Making scallion oil takes 24 hours (including resting time in the fridge)

Perhaps with some better planning, we could have gotten through these recipes in a couple of days… Next time!

We started by combining the ingredients for the brioche (flour, eggs, salt, yeast) in a stand mixer as it seemed like the most time-intensive activity.

After dough had some time to combine, we added butter and beat the dough with the dough hook attachment to the stand mixer until it was silky and smooth.

At this point, the dough rested in the fridge overnight. The following day, we separated the dough into sections and rolled them into balls.

We then placed the dough in a preheated oven to proof for 3 hours.

Upon removal from the oven, we applied a glaze of egg yolk to each bun and cut an X mark on the top. This process was a little stressful because we noticed the buns collapsing–as a result, not all the buns got a perfect X mark.

When we removed them from the oven, the buns were golden and had a beautiful glossy finish.

With the brioche completed, we chopped up the green part of some scallions as the first step in preparing the scallion oil.

After a quick blanch for 30 seconds in boiling water, the scallions were combined with oil and the mixture pulsed until there weren’t many large pieces left.

The resulting mixture was placed in the fridge to infuse overnight. The following day, we ran the mixture through a conical strainer and set the bowl aside to start plating.

I think the fiery part of any recipe is our favourite… there’s a little (I really mean a lot) of danger involved in letting either one of us hold a torch. We may have burned some holes in the foil we were using to line the baking pan, but the silver lining here is that we used a baking pan under the foil.

We tried to burn each of the brioche pieces as lightly as possible . After a certain amount of time though, Melissa threw caution to the wind and really burned some bread with a truly pyromaniacal look in her eyes.

We cut the brioche into several shapes with the intention of trying different plating techniques. This later turned into a plating competition, so feel free to vote for your favourite at the end of this post!

Plating Style #1

Plating Style #2

This deceivingly simple combination of flavours was amazing. The burnt flavour of the bread combined with a hint of tang from the scallion oil and green tomatoes created a very complex and appealing flavor. We added some Maldon salt which added another dimension to the dish. There’s no question that we would make this again, but maybe next time we will plan a little better and combine the preparation of elements that require similar time frames. The complexity of the elements means that this recipe probably isn’t going to be something you’d prepare for a dinner party, but maybe for a small gathering of friends or family.

It’s unreasonably hard to locate squid ink in the Greater Toronto Area. We spent a few days calling a few dozen specialty and gourmet food stores trying to locate some squid ink for this recipe. After this frustration, we decided to go the route of harvesting the ink ourselves from the fresh squids we ended up finding at the our local Asian foods market. The recipe began with some beautiful fresh local tomatoes, basil and garlic from our farmers market.

Don’t worry, the tomatoes didn’t grow multicolored on one vine, we just put them together to make the image look less busy! The tomatoes were quickly blanched in boiling water for a few seconds then plunged into an ice bath and peeled.

These were then diced, and placed in a saucepan to simmer with basil, garlic and olive oil until slightly reduced. We then turned our attention to the fun ingredient of this recipe–the squid. This process was not very complicated, and I had fun taking it apart. Melissa, on the other hand, had a hard time staying in the room to take pictures. The process was as follows:

I rinsed the squid under running water for a few minutes until clean.

The tentacles and head were removed from the body, while being careful not to rupture the ink sac and placed in a bowl of cold water.

The spine was pulled out from the body (this looks surprisingly like plastic, I was shocked!).

I then peeled the reddish/purple skin from the squid to reveal the nice glossy white meat underneath.

(This is where things get a little messy!)

The tentacles were separated from the head right under the eyes, while being careful to not puncture one of the small ink sacs located behind the eyes.

At this point we couldn’t avoid it any longer, it was time to extract some squid ink. The ink sac was actually larger than we thought it would be for this size of the squid. It had a shiny blue exterior, and felt hard and filled with ink of a play-dough like consistency.

After some research online, we decided it was best to harvest the ink into a half and half mixture of white vinegar and water as the help dissolve the crystalline ink.

After this was finished, I sliced up the bodies and tentacles and lightly fried them in a pan. In hindsight, I think I cut the calamari rings a little thick–noted for next time!

I then added some of the harvested squid ink to the cooked calamari and mixed it to coat the white meat in a bowl.

Plating this recipe was quick and simple. We placed some of the “tomato stew” into a shallow dish and topped it with the cooked and coated calamari.

The resulting dish was visually stunning! I definitely overcooked the calamari, but otherwise the combination of flavours was nice. The tomato component was delicious, I would eat this part on its own or make it as a side dish with dinner.

After we finished the recipe, we did some research online and learned that the squid ink had the strange consistency it did because of the age of the squid. If I were to try this again, I would use a younger and fresher squid!

This wonderfully simple blueberry tart was so delicious that we made it again while visiting family this past week. The hardest part of making this tart was the waiting! We started with the parts of the recipe that required time to sit overnight–the mascarpone vanilla cream, and the breton dough.

For the mascarpone cream, we combined the mascarpone, vanilla seeds, honey, and heavy cream and set the mixture in the fridge to rest overnight.

In another bowl, we combined eggs and sugar for the breton dough.

To this mixture, we added some butter that we infused with even more vanilla seeds.

Next, we added flour and worked the dough until it was just combined, wrapped it in cellophane, and placed it in the fridge to rest overnight.

The next day, we removed the dough from the fridge and rolled it out. This started out as a surprisingly hard task as the dough was rock solid. After a short while, the dough eventually became so soft that it became increasingly difficult to un-stick from the rolling-pin.

To fix this problem, we rolled the dough between parchment paper sheets and carefully placed it in a large tart mold. The recipe is for a blueberry tartlet, but we already had a large tart mold and decided to make one large tart instead of 4 tartlets. While the recipe didn’t specifically mention weighting down the dough, we added some dried kidney beans on top of the dough as we had experienced some problems with shrinking dough in the past. We must have left the beans on for too long, because the edges of the tart shell turned golden brown well before the center!

After the tart shell had some time to rest, we evenly spread the mascarpone vanilla cream inside.

The last step of this recipe involved lightly warming fresh blueberries in honey for a few minutes.

Finally, we placed the beautiful purple berries on top of the mascarpone cream. We exercised a little bit of restraint in order to capture photos of the constructing of the dessert–it was really hard to resist!

We sprinkled some caster sugar on top as a finishing touch right before we cut a piece.

There really is nothing not to like about this dessert! The tart shell was crunchy and sweet and embodied all of the flavours of a butter cookie (biscuit sablé), the mascarpone vanilla cream added some richness and a light sweet flavour, and the blueberries were juicy and delicate. The simplicity of this delicious blueberry tart will make it a favourite for us to serve at dinner parties or to enjoy at home on a Saturday night!

Oh duck fat… I’ve seen it called liquid gold–it has the magical ability to make pretty much everything a little more delicious than if you used butter or oil. Today, I had the pleasure of filling an entire saucepan with duck fat, cooking a few small birds in it, and subsequently eating them. Suffice to say, I had a pretty good day!

The recipe started with brining the quails in salt, sugar, peppercorns and basil. We really had fun with this picture–after some trial and error with different containers, we ended up going for a scientific specimen jar look.

Next up, we prepared a mirepoix that contained onion, carrots and leeks.

With most of the prep done, I turned my attention to the duck fat. The tubs o’ duck fat were slowly melted in a saucepan.

The mirepoix was added to the saucepan of duck fat (which I found interesting) and the mixture left to simmer on low heat for a while. The vegetables turned a really nice golden brown and added flavour to the duck fat. The addition of the mirepoix also formed a cushion at the base of the saucepan to keep the quails from scorching the bottom.

The quails themselves were taken out of the brining liquid, patted dry, and stuffed with some lemon and thyme before being plunged into a golden bath of duck fat.

As this cooking process was new to me, it was very fun to experience for the first time. The heat was set at a temperature in order to keep the fat at a low simmer and after the initial (and expected) spatter phase of cooking, the quail simmered gently.

When cooking was done, the quail were taken out of their bath, and patted dry to remove excess fat. The first thing I noticed was that the skin was completely rendered. My second observation was that the meat was surprisingly dry and stringy. This probably had more to do with the vendor at the farmer’s market having frozen the quail than with the actual cooking method. The meat tasted delicious–the flavour of thyme and lemon really shone through and it was not even remotely too oily or fatty.

All in all, I really enjoyed cooking this dish! It seems like this cooking technique is something that would be worth my time to practice and perfect, because honestly, everything tastes better when submerged in duck fat!